cruise ships

Genco Imports?

Allegedly, Berlusconi puts his sausage about quite a lot :-)

Reports are that Gates and Buffet and Romney give away substantial fractions of their incomes. Obama gives about 1% to charities, Biden less.

Hey, I donate more to good causes than does the President of the United States!

John

Kewl. I just got his next book:

Summary of results: conservatives are happier and more optimistic, lefties feel victimized and bitter. Poor conservatives aren't bitter, because they believe that people with more worked for it, and they themselves could too, if they wanted.

Hilarious--he's not paying his fair share. He's right though, he owes his circumstances to luck, and societal support (handouts). Where he fails is thinking that everyone else does too.

James

We do. Some of us, anyway.

Jeroen Belleman

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I think he thought he was explaining why he'd over-ruled the engineers, who seemed to think - having talked to me about it, in two separate interview sessions - that I could do the work. Personnel people do have this strange idea that they understand what engineers do, and can draw sensible conclusions from reading engineering CV's.

I've interviewed enough of the people that they've screened to know that this is total nonsense, and nobody I've worked for has ever disagreed, but nobody has ever managed to stop them rejecting good engineers. Occasionally a good CV will make an end-run around the system - the best one I recall had the Chinese engineer's wife playing badminton with the wife of a junior engineer, which lead to the guy's CV ending up on our chief engineer's desk. We promptly grabbed him and managed to hang onto him for three years before he was head-hunted to the US. Personnel had binned his CV three times along the way.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Got it already -- posted that in a reply to John. :-)

James

Hey John... WAKE THE F*CK UP!

A Z I P O D

Go look it up. There are NO steam powered AZIPODS, you stupid f*ck. They are ALL ELECTRIC.

And, there are NO AZIPODS on ANY aircraft carriers, you absolute idiot.

And NO, it has not a goddamned thing to do with how the electric was generated either, f*****ad.

All that anger is messing you up. And keeping you AlwaysWrong.

John

=A0Or

Ahhhh, then it /is/ a stimulus plan.

-- Cheers, James

r--

Buffett and Gates have given half their wealth to charity, and have have been touring the US convincing billionaires to do the same.

That's what I meant when I said Buffett would rather give it away than pay tax--it's literally true. Gates too.

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I don't need to. You've got a system where the rich can satisfy their obligations to the tax collectors by paying out a lower proportion of their income than people with average incomes. The details of how it works aren't - of themselves - interesting. The fact that it happens is evidence that you have problem that you need to fix.

I'm not in the least surprised that you deny that it happens - you have a habit of ignoring evidence that doesn't suit your prejudices - nor that you have cited loads of "evidence" that you think (incorrectly) demonstrates that the problem doesn't exist. I'm afraid you use evidence He as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination, to misquote Andrew Lang (1844-1912).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Since I spent most of my career figuring out mundane details, Ken S Tucker couldn't be more wrong.

Since the point of my first questions was to exploit Ken S Tucker's claimed expertise in General Relativity to get an explanation of why the strong nuclear force isn't used to explain gravity, and the second to explain why the hypothetical force that drove the inflation that immediately followed the Big Bang can't be used to explain dark energy (which is to say why the universe is currently expanding at an accelerating rate), there wasn't any suggestion that there was any "electrical solution" to the strong nuclear force.

There was enough mundane data in the questions to make it obvious that I knew more was needed, but it would be that sort of stuff that an ex- graduate student of physics - which Ken S. Tucker claims to be - would have had at his finger tips.

Since even the Residual Strong Nuclear Force (between protons and protons and protons and neutrons, as opposed to between quarks) is some 10^37 times stronger than gravity

the simplest answer to the first question is that simple distance doesn't dilute the Residual Strong Force enough to let it explain gravity - on superficial examination, distance is only good for an attenuation of about 10^15. There are more sophisticated ways of looking at the situation - which an ex-graduate student of physics might be expected to know about - and they may not give the same answer.

As usual, Ken S Tucker is parading his cognitive defects - and lacks the wit to perceive this.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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But he's not wrong here. Azipod is a trade name, and the manufacturer reserves it for for an electrically driven propellor

If you could pipe high pressure steam through a rotatable joint, and build a very compact steam engine inside the pod, you might build a steam powered equivalent, but you still couldn't call it an Azipod.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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Presumably, if you could, you could set up your own pasta-making factory and under-cut the Italian imports. You should not be too dismissive of Italian technology. Mr Illy was one of the first to adopt the process of decaffeinating coffee with super-critical CO2, and my wife won't let me buy any other form of decaffeinated coffee.

Berlusconi set up the Italian equivalent of the Tea Party, and as their US equivalent seems to be intent on doing, settled down to adjust the Italian economy to suit a particular group of economic interests (much as the US Republican Party has been doing for years). Since the particular economic interests being looked after were all owned by Berlusconi, the rest of the Italian economy went down-hill faster than the US economy is doing - a much large proportion of US capital bribes its creatures in congress - but the principle (or lack of principle) involved is identical - the people that own the country should run the country.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Yeah, and you would be a loon to try to directly power a propeller with a "steam engine".

There is a reason why they do not install locomotive engines in ships.

Electric motors are efficient torque delivery mechanisms. Especially when weight is a factor. It is easier to deliver electrons to a transducer than it is to deliver heat OR steam 'energy'.

That is why there is usually a distinction between energy and power delivery. Where one uses what energy to make what power available in what way.

The final element is the prop blade against the water, with limitations caused by the onset of cavitation. The most efficient power delivery transducer for that is, in today's world, an electric motor.

The most efficient delivery device for that, in practical terms, is then the cable that carries the electricity to the motor. To be practical, this remains in the hard conductor class, as opposed to superconducting passes, which are indeed being examined in ground based electrical runs.

After that, we are now at the electrical power generation transducers, which are usually gas or steam turbine driven AC alternators.

So the choice comes down to gas or steam or diesel as the primary device used to turn the alternators (or generators) which power the motors attached directly to the prop drive shafts.

Sometimes there is a bank of batteries in the chain for a DC fed power system (at the drive motors). They get kept topped off, and get switched in for silent ops or as temporary outage abatement. A UPS.

The work needs to be done on the prop system. Jet skis are nice. They should make a tractoring system along those lines. The azipod thing is for in-port maneuvering capacity, for the most part.

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Why not? They've got more control over where the money goes when they give it away.

Buffett's point is that the present tax structure isn't good for the country as a whole - I don't know whether he shares my opinion that you aren't investing enough in feeding and educating the children of the less-well off to optimise your future work force, but it is a point of view that has appreciable support - Will Hutton advanced it a few years ago in his book "The World We're In"

which has (predictably) never been well-received in the US ...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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The whole Buffett thing is a farce. a) If Buffett really thought his taxes too low, all he has to do is pay more. Instead, he's giving it away. b) Buffett gets a better rate because he's doing things society encourages thru lower rates. c) Anyone who does the same, gets the same rate. d) Buffett pays $7million a year, for crying out loud. e) None of that's reason to double taxes on everyone else. f) None of that proves widespread problems. g) None of it comes close to paying for the real problem, Barack's spending. Outright confiscation isn't enough to cover it.

In fact, the aggregate, average, effective rate paid by people earning

(*)

James